Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (23 page)

Equally crucial, although not as popular, were a series of records by a vocal group called the Volcanoes, featuring the same musicians. Released a couple of months after “Yes, I’m Ready,” the Volcanoes’ “Storm Warning” was the first step toward the revolution of “Only the Strong Survive.” While the beat and the interplay between the drums and piano were straight out of Berry Gordy’s songbook (which helped it become a Northern Soul classic), the jazzy guitar that introduces the record and the vibraphone chimes throughout mark this as a significant advance on the Motown blueprint. This was where Philadelphia’s jazz scene really made its mark on soul music, particularly the influence of George Shearing’s legendary quintet recordings of 1949. Shearing was a British pianist who brought a vibes player, Marjorie Hyams, into his group, and the block-chord interplay between the two introduced a new sound to jazz. On “Storm Warning,” it is vibist Vince Montana fleshing out the melody led by an undermixed piano. The lead being played by the piano and vibraphone would become the critical component in the Philly sound. As Weldon McDougal said, “The Volcanoes records were really like when Philadelphia started developing their own thing. Up until then most uptempo Philly records were based on Detroit things … The vibes sound, the way the strings sweetened things without getting in the way of the beat, all the rhythm sounds started coming together on those records. The songs were pretty good too. Kenny and Leon wrote some of ’em.”
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Gamble and Huff didn’t write “Storm Warning,” but they did write “Help Wanted!,” a more straightforward Motown-styled number, for the group. “Help Wanted!” was the second song the two wrote together, and their partnership would really begin to flourish the following year, in 1966, when they formed Excel Records (soon to be renamed Gamble Records) and released a record by the local soul group the Intruders. “(We’ll Be) United” was the most extravagant record yet from Philadelphia. Of course there was the characteristic vibraphone and the opulent strings that dominated the record, but there was also a harpsichord plinking away, creating a stairway to heaven for lead singer Sam “Little Sonny” Brown and his betrothed to walk up. Even though Brown was just about the most ragged vocalist in the history of soul (he’s not terrible here, but listen to “Cowboys to Girls,” “(Love Is Like a) Baseball Game,” or “I’ll Always Love My Mama,” where he wanders off pitch like a drunk trying to walk a straight line), this was the first major hit of another strain of Philadelphia soul that would have a major impact on disco, “sweet soul.”

According to Philadelphia soul chronicler Tony Cummings, Eddie Holman’s 1966 hit, “This Can’t Be True,” was “unarguably the archetype on which much of Philadelphia’s ‘sweet soul’ sound was based.”
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Holman’s helium falsetto against a background of dangling guitar phrases laced with cavernous reverb, a dragging bass line that reached down to the center of the earth, a slow shuffle drumbeat that recalled doo-wop rhythms, and backing vocals not that far removed from the countrypolitan productions of Eddy Arnold and Jim Reeves reinvented the sound of male vulnerability. This and the Intruders may have been the beginning of “sweet soul,” but the sound was perfected by Thom Bell, who arranged “Only the Strong Survive.” Bell had known Gamble since high school and the two had worked together at Cameo-Parkway in 1959, where Bell soon became the arranger for Chubby Checker. In 1968, Bell started producing the Delfonics for their manager Stan Watson’s new label, Philly Groove. The first record he did with them was “La-La Means I Love You,” a record so unctuous, soft, and squishy it sounded as if it had been coated in laxative. Bell’s Delfonics productions used as many as forty musicians (including Baker, Young, Harris, Montana, and guitarist Roland Chambers, with Bell himself playing keyboards and timpani) and such utterly unsoulful instruments as flugelhorn, oboe, bassoon, French horn, and sitar. By combining oleaginous orchestration, suave jazz licks, and teddy-bear or even castratilike male vocals, this “softening” of the soul sound linked to dignity, noble struggle, pride, and assertiveness in the popular imagination led inexorably to disco’s feminizing influence and its critique of masculinity.

When lead singer Gene Faith left the Volcanoes for a solo career in 1969, the group changed its name to the Moods and then, in 1971, to the Trammps. Originally consisting of Earl Young (drums, lead bass voice), Ron “Have Mercy” Kersey (keyboards), Dennis Harris (guitar), Jimmy Ellis (lead tenor vocals), Stanley Wade (bass, second tenor), and John Hart (vocals), the Trammps combined the vocal interplay of groups like the Coasters with gospelish sermonizing and the driving beat of MFSB. With this blend of roots and unabashed dance floor appeal, the Trammps served as the bridge between the Philly sound and the discotheque. From their earliest hit, a cover of “Zing Went the Strings of My Heart,” which was originally popularized by Judy Garland and covered by the Coasters, to their mid-1970s heyday, the Trammps replaced the tension at the heart of Gamble and Huff’s signature sound with a wholehearted embrace of the disco. With Young (the man who pretty much invented the disco beat) at the helm, the Trammps created perhaps disco’s greatest anthems to itself: “That’s Where the Happy People Go” and “Disco Inferno.”

Bell would continue to explore this downy terrain throughout the early ’70s with ever more flocculent records by the Stylistics, the Spinners, Ronnie Dyson, and New York City. Soon after his initial success with the Delfonics, Bell’s soft soul sound became something of a cottage industry in Philadelphia during the late ’60s and early ’70s, with numerous arrangers and producers trying their hand at it. Vince Montana, who had first started to play the vibes at age eight when he traded a cap gun for a friend’s xylophone, was one such chancer. The first record he arranged turned out to be a cult classic of the genre. The Ethics’ “Think About Tomorrow” was almost a carbon copy of “La-La Means I Love You” with Montana “us[ing] my basic sound on that: six, two and one. Six violins, two violas and a cello, plus flute and French horn,”
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but adding a bass line that borrowed heavily from Motown’s James Jamerson.

This blend of a richly upholstered musical bed and propulsive groove was writ large on “Only the Strong Survive,” which had the sharpest instrumental definition of any soul record up to that point. Instead of recording the guitars through amplifiers, they were plugged directly into the soundboard, producing a deep, resonant sound that achieved almost the exact opposite effect of Motown records. Where Motown mastered its records with lots of high end, geared toward the transistor radios and car audio on which most teenagers used to listen to music, Gamble and Huff used a more naturalistic sound, perfectly in tune with the new stereo systems that were proliferating in middle-class households. Much of this was thanks to a new studio that opened in August 1968 at 212 North 12th Street in Philadelphia. Sigma Studios was built by former Cameo-Parkway engineer Joe Tarsia. Previously, Tarsia had been a researcher for Philco, one of America’s largest electronics companies, where he worked on projects like early bar code readers, Sidewinder missile guidance systems, and electrostatic speakers for home stereo systems. He brought this technological nous to Sigma, which was one of the first studios to have twenty-four-track recording facilities and multitrack noise reduction capabilities. Such advanced equipment and techniques allowed Gamble and Huff to achieve their vision of soul as not so much urban music but urbane music.

On top of these arrangements and production values that once and for all left the roadhouse and chicken shack of old behind were often either raggedy voices (Jerry Butler’s voice fraying at the edges, straining to reach the notes on “Only the Strong Survive,” the Intruders’ Little Sonny walking the tightrope of pitch, the Ebonys’ tenor singer David Beasley adding a heap of gravel to the soft-soul mix on “You’re the Reason Why” and “It’s Forever”) or defiantly patriarchal, preaching, ruggedly masculine singers like the O’Jays’ Eddie Levert, Wilson Pickett, Joe Simon, and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ Teddy Pendergrass. While on one hand Gamble and Huff perhaps thought that such brassy and gruff singers were needed to cut through the layers of sweetening (although Thom Bell clearly didn’t think so), this contrast between the cracked voice and plush appointments was also the embodiment in sound of the rise of the post–civil rights black middle class. It’s a sound struggling to come to grips with itself, constantly pulling and pushing against its own edges in a vain attempt to resolve its own contradictions, a sound that is desperately trying to move forward and aspire to something greater yet at the same time trying to cling to the old familiar, to maintain a sense of rootedness. It’s a sound of resolute, patriarchal masculinity and staunch classicism (the reliance on jazz licks and chords, the orchestral arrangements) wrestling with petticoat pop and vanguard technology. It’s a sound of a defiant black positivity trying to piggyback on a color-blind pragmatism. As Joe Tarsia relates, “I remember going to a NATRA convention, a black broadcasters convention in DC in about 1970, ’71 with the G&H roster of artists and what was to become the MFSB Orchestra. At the convention a guy came up to Gamble and asked why there were so many white musicians in the orchestra, Gamble replied, ‘My color is not white or black, it’s green.’”
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These irreconcilable differences not only made for the most fascinating music of the early ’70s but also helped Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International label to take over from Motown as the most visible and representative symbol of black capitalism (by 1978, Philadelphia International was the fifth-biggest black-owned company in the United States, with an annual gross of $25 million). The label was formed in 1971 after a distribution deal with Chess for its Neptune label (which had hits with the O’Jays’ “One Night Affair” and “Looky Looky [Look at Me Girl]”) collapsed when Leonard Chess died and the Chess empire fell into disarray. Gamble and Huff approached CBS president Clive Davis, who was looking for a way to gain a foothold in the black music market for his lily-white company (the only two contemporary artists of color on his roster at the time were Sly & the Family Stone and Santana). They signed a very modest independent production deal that gave them $75,000 for fifteen singles and $25,000 per album, and had some moderate success on the R&B chart with the Ebonys’ “You’re the Reason Why” and “Determination.” In addition to his songwriting and producing duties, Kenny Gamble found himself working directly with CBS’s promotions department in order to help them understand the black music world, which was completely foreign to them.

On May 11, 1972, Harvard Business School presented “A Study of the Soul Music Environment Prepared for Columbia Records Group,” which had been commissioned by Columbia Records (of which CBS was a part). Costing $5,000 and prepared over the course of six months by six master’s students, the study suggested that because “30 percent of the top 40 is composed of records which have ‘crossed over’ from soul stations,” the group should end its longstanding indifference toward black music and develop a “well-planned and well-financed initiative aimed at long-term market penetration.”
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The group was encouraged to “create a cadre of black staff at the CRG; recruit successful black personnel to fill the ranks of that cadre; and develop strong links with black radio”
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in order to strengthen the CRG’s relationship with the black community, which viewed them as “an ultra-rich, ultra-white giant which has for the most part chosen to snub blacks in the business. Blacks in the trade feel that CRG has heaped upon them the ultimate insult: that of ignoring their existence.”
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Until a “Soul Product Group” could be developed, a strategy of “
BUYING TIME WHILE THE REQUIRED INTERNAL SUPPORT ORGANIZATION IS STAFFED AND DEVELOPED
” should be adopted, including “making custom label arrangements with ‘outside product resources.’”
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This is exactly what Davis had done with Gamble and Huff, and thus vindicated by a handful of prospective MBAs, CBS put its full promotional muscle behind Philadelphia International. Within two months, Philadelphia International had its first monster hit.

As we have seen, the O’Jays’ “Back Stabbers” was an unlikely song to mark the new alliance between aspirational black capitalism and gray flannel business as usual. But, then again, so much of the record’s force derives from its production values, from the vivid detail and pinpoint clarity that a new injection of cash enabled Gamble and Huff to achieve, from the tension between the candy-coated sweetening and rootsy, churchified pleading. Most of the label’s other big hits—the O’Jays’ “Love Train,” “I Love Music,” “For the Love of Money,” and “Use ta Be My Girl”; Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” “The Love I Lost,” “Bad Luck,” and “Wake Up Everybody”; Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones”; the Three Degrees’ “When Will I See You Again”; MFSB’s “TSOP”; the Intruders’ “I’ll Always Love My Mama”; and Lou Rawls’s “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine”—followed a similar pattern. Where other practitioners of symphonic soul like Barry White and Van McCoy gorged on glacé strings and syrupy horn fanfares as if they had the sweet tooth of a thousand seven-year-olds, Gamble and Huff often paradoxically used the most mellifluous elements of the arrangement to drive the track forward. Most of the track was improvised in the studio with the musicians “jamming off the most skeletal of charts,”
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meaning that even the vibes, strings, and horns were tied tightly to the prevailing rhythm. As Vince Montana said, “With Gamble & Huff, we put the vibes on with the rhythm as opposed to with the sweetening.”
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Listen to Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ 1973 hit “The Love I Lost” to hear how they used strings to propel the music and not just soften it.

Along with the Temptations’ “Law of the Land,” “The Love I Lost” marks the birth of disco as a genre of music; it is the beginning of the codification of disco as a
style
rather than the
taste
of whatever DJ happened to be playing at that time. This was hardly the fault, or the intention, of Gamble, Huff, and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. It was just that they had hit upon the epitome of dance music: the hissing hi-hats, the thumping bass sound, the surging momentum, the uplifting horns, the strings taking flight, lead singer Teddy Pendergrass’s over-the-top gospel passion working as sandpaper against the honeyed backing vocals. “The Love I Lost” managed the feat of providing for joyful exorcism through its tempo and Pendergrass’s testifying while the strings and that luscious Fender Rhodes were like a sympathetic friend putting his hand on your shoulder and telling you it was all going to be okay. While drummer Earl Young basically created the next two decades of dance music with his snare pattern and hi-hat work on “The Love I Lost,”
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it was perhaps Pendergrass taking gospel sermonizing to new levels of excess that really marked disco as a separate entity from soul. Like LaBelle’s theatrics a year later, Pendergrass helped move gospelese’s expressive language of grunts, wails, melisma, “Good God y’all,” and punctuating shifts of emphasis away from the church and into the realm of pure stylization. While the soul singers of the ’60s had already soiled the sanctity of gospel by using its language to talk about sin, they retained its faith in deliverance, even if it was only the earthly salvation provided by human, not divine, love. When disco went mainstream, however, it wasn’t interested in redemption, only the pleasures of the flesh.